沈黙

11.12.2011

The title of this post reads Chinmoku, which means Silence. It is the name of a famous novel written by Shūsaku Endō (1923–96), published in 1966. Martin Scorsese is now adapting it to film. It is great news that Scorsese is returning to directly spiritual topics. Although we may say that his films are always about the struggles of the soul, as Shutter Island (2010) demonstrates, this kind of direct engagement has not happened since the late 1990s with Bringing Out the Dead (1999).

The book tells the story of a Portuguese Jesuit missionary, Sebastião Rodrigues (based on the historical figure Giuseppe Chiara), sent to Japan in the 17th century to aid the local Church and investigate reports that his mentor, Cristóvão Ferreira, has become an apostate. What he finds is open persecution and the Kakure Kirishitan (Hidden Christians), a modern term for the members of the Japanese Catholic Church who went underground after the Shimabara Rebellion in the 1630s. Written partly in the form of letters by the protagonist, the themes of the silence of God and of the trials of faith were informed by the author’s experience of religious discrimination in Japan, racism in France, and debilitating tuberculosis. The novel won the prestigious Tanizaki Prize. It is considered Endō's finest work.

Endō is one of the most celebrated writers of the Third Generation, so called because it was the third major group of writers to emerge after World War II. He wrote from the uncommon perspective of being both Japanese and a Catholic convert. Leith Morton, a scholar who has studied the image of Christ in Endō’s fiction, argues that his writings were dominated by a single theme: the belief in Christianity.